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Vegas is always a lot. But, somehow, at Shoptalk, it felt like even more this year.

More AI. More agents. More channels to sell through. More software vendors creating features and products that bleed into each other.

You always leave Shoptalk exhausted. But it felt like, this year, almost everyone there was exhausted from just trying to keep up with the pace of change.

One agency friend I talked to said, jokingly, that if she heard the word "AI" one more time she was going to stab out her eyes. I told her not to walk the conference floor. She was going to have a bad time.

The pitch of this moment is leverage. Do more with less. Move faster. Build faster. Agents will handle it.

On the vendor side, everyone is racing to build more, faster. On the brand side, everyone is being told to be in all the new channels (TikTok Shops, ChatGPT, etc) and use all these new tools to do more.

The problem is that "more possible" has quietly become "more expected." And more expected has become more work — not less. There's a study from Harvard Business School from the last few months that found AI is actually making people more stressed, not less, because the expectations just rise to meet the new capacity.

More possibilities feel good for the business, but worse for the employee. And that's what I kept hearing at Shoptalk: It wasn't a sense of excitement; it was a sense of being overwhelmed.

People are no longer asking for more software to make their jobs easier. They're asking for less cognitive load.

This is where Intelligems will live: In the overlap of focus and decision-making, because it's going to be the most important component to brands going forward.

As the ability to do something increasingly becomes a commodity, the ability to decide whether it's something worth doing is becoming more valuable.

Decision-making is becoming more complex because of all the "mores" we talked about above. There's more options now. And there's more data from more channels and more tools, and it's all over the place.

The same way a SaaS company can drown in feature slop — building everything it can build, rather than the one or two things that actually matter — brands can drown in opportunity slop. Chasing every distribution opportunity to incompletion or testing everything possible, no matter the potential marginal gains.

Better decision-making is going to be a value driver. We're building for that future.